It seemed the usual reserve of Vogue adjectives wouldn’t do for a cover girl of this caliber. In the swoony profile, Hamish Bowles creates a new vocabulary of descriptors befitting Nyong’o. She’s a “cucumber cool,” “swanlike apparition” who is “as beautiful and hieratic as an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat goddess” and as “preternaturally poised as a prewar debutante.”

If anybody deserves new words for amazing, it’s Nyong’o — so, fine work, Vogue! This is such a nice bit of news, we’ll only raise a slight eyebrow at the racially tinged exoticism of shooting her in Marrakech.